The present invention relates to electronics assemblies, and is primarily concerned with racked assemblies. Many such assemblies will be located in racks for housing in for example nineteen inch cabinets, or other size cabinets such as twenty three inch or metric cabinets. The assemblies may for instance be employed as servers for a number of systems, for example in local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), telecommunications systems or other operations such as database management or as internet servers.
Such assemblies are shipped from their manufacturing location to the end users, where they are installed, typically in a nineteen inch rack in a data centre. The assemblies need mechanical protection during shipping and transportation to their final destination, and are therefore securely packaged, normally being supported on a wooden pallet in a box or other container and employing standard packaging materials such as foam rubber or expanded polystyrene.
However, such packaging materials have a limited lifespan, normally lasting only a single shipping and installation process, after which they are discarded. More importantly, many packaging materials will generate dust and other contaminants when handled, with the result that many organisations do not allow such materials in the data centres. This has the result that the assemblies must be removed from the packaging outside the data centre and only after the removal can they be moved into the data centre. Thus, the assemblies are completely unprotected at a time when they may be most prone to damage by being knocked or dropped.